Through a colonial lens: photography, orientalism, and the middle east
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Photography has played a pivotal role in constructing and reinforcing Orientalist narratives about the Middle East. This paper investigates how 19th and early 20th-century European photographers, such as Félix Bonfils and Rudolph Carl Huber, contributed to colonial depictions of the region, shaping Western perceptions through staged and stereotypical imagery. Drawing from Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism, this study examines how these images framed the Middle East as exotic, timeless, and inferior to the West. In contrast, local photographers like Aqa Reza Akasbashi and Ashraf Os-Saltaneh documented their communities with authenticity, challenging Eurocentric portrayals. By analyzing the contrast between these photographic traditions, this research underscores the role of photography as both a tool of imperial ideology and a medium for cultural self-representation, advocating for a more nuanced understanding of historical and contemporary visual narratives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".